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by
Scott Adams
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February 12 - February 27, 2018
If you believe humans are fundamentally rational, you will have a hard time learning to be a hypnotist because hypnotists rely on our irrational brain wiring to persuade.
PERSUASION TIP 9 Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.
PERSUASION TIP 10 Persuasion is strongest when the messenger is credible.
PERSUASION TIP 11 Guess what people are thinking—at the very moment they think it—and call it out. If you are right, the subject bonds to you for being like-minded.
PERSUASION TIP 12 If you want the audience to embrace your content, leave out any detail that is both unimportant and would give people a reason to think, That’s not me. Design into your content enough blank spaces so people can fill them in with whatever makes them happiest.
A good hypnotist could give students the impression they got more value than they did. But don’t worry too much about that second point. You wouldn’t want to learn hypnosis from an instructor who couldn’t persuade his own class to give him good reviews.
Ha.
I will go so far as to say that Trump could have run as a Democrat, embraced Bernie Sanders’s entire platform, and won the election that way.
The popular interpretation of how Trump won is that he understood the American people and devised policies that they wanted. My filter says the opposite. It says Trump convinced the public that his policies were the ones they should care about the most. And so they did.
Trump is so persuasive that policies didn’t matter. People voted for him even as his policies were murky and changing.
PERSUASION TIP 13 Use the High-Ground Maneuver to frame yourself as the wise adult in the room. It forces others to join you or be framed as the small thinkers.
We humans like to think we are creatures of reason. We aren’t.1 The reality is that we make our decisions first and rationalize them later.2 It just doesn’t feel that way to us. That’s why I often said during the 2015–16 election that “facts and policies don’t matter.” Obviously the facts and policies do matter to outcomes. But in terms of persuasion, facts and policies and reason are almost useless.
You brush your teeth to avoid cavities, you set your alarm clock to wake up on time, and so on. So your daily experience of living involves making one rational decision after another. You also believe—incorrectly—that you are rational when you make the big decisions about love and money and lifestyle. But that’s mostly a result of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. When we do irrational things—such as marry someone who is obviously a bad choice—we always have plenty of “reasons” to offer.
Lots of people said they did. I’ll take it one step further by saying Trump would have won the election even if he and Clinton had switched positions and erased our memories of their old opinions.
While analogies are useful and important for explaining new concepts, here’s the important point for our purposes: Analogies are terrible for persuasion.
PERSUASION TIP 14 When you attack a person’s belief, the person under attack is more likely to harden his belief than to abandon it, even if your argument is airtight.
There are two good reasons why analogies fail to persuade. The first is that they are a form of pseudologic, much like word-thinking. For people who are unfamiliar with the mechanics of logic and reason, analogies feel as if they should work.
When a decision involves lots of facts, and we have access to all the facts, we are more likely to hallucinate that we used our powers of reason to reach a decision. But when we recognize that we don’t have all the facts, we hallucinate that we used our gut feeling to bridge the gap.
If a filter on reality makes you happy, and it does a good job predicting, that is probably a good filter.
the first reason analogies fail at persuasion is that they are not designed for that job. Analogies are not logic. They are just a quick way to explain a new concept.
The second reason analogies fail is because they are imprecise by definition. That gives people on the other side of ...
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My hypothesis—consistent with the Persuasion Filter—is that people who already had a firm opinion of Trump were not persuaded by the Hitler analogies. That is consistent with analogies being a weak form of persuasion. But not all voters had a firm opinion of Trump.
For the people who didn’t already know Trump, the Hitler analogy was effective, not because analogies are persuasive but because this one did a good job explaining Trump for the first time to people who had no deep knowledge of him.
Remember, analogies are great for explaining a new concept. And this concept of Trump as a new Hitler was filling an empty space for lots of voters who didn’t know much about Trump. And this brings us to another persuasion topic I have already mentioned: anchors.
The human brain forms a bias for the things it hears first. If we accept the thing we hear first, it tends to harden into an irrational belief. And then it is difficult to dislodge. If your friends are reinforcing the idea too, it becomes hard as steel.
Associations matter more than reason.
analogies are not persuasive on their own. But if the analogy is simply a carrier for a persuasive association—let’s say, comparing any strong leader to Hitler—the association can be persuasive to some, even while the details of the analogy are ridiculous. Now watch me summarize this point by using an analogy, because analogies are good at explaining new concepts: If your analogy includes a strong negative association (such as Hitler), you could think of the analogy as a holster and the negative association as a gun. The gun is persuasive. The holster is not.
the early marketers of vitamins cleverly convinced us that taking vitamins fits into our existing waking-up and/or going-to-bed habits. Now the practice of taking vitamins around the same time as you are brushing your teeth seems easy and natural. So we keep doing it.
PERSUASION TIP 15 Studies say humans more easily get addicted to unpredictable rewards than they do predictable rewards.
Now ask yourself whether President Trump rewards his supporters in a predictable way or in an unpredictable way. Right, he is unpredictable as heck. In the morning he disappoints, but by lunchtime he delights. You never know what is coming. And that, in part, is why his supporters are addicted to him.
you can improve the power of your persuasion by grafting your story onto people’s existing aspirations.
The active part of the persuasion is the change to what. Trump offered the more aspirational persuasion.
To maximize your fear persuasion, follow these guidelines. A big fear is more persuasive than a small one. A personal fear is more persuasive than a generic national problem. A fear that you think about most often is stronger than one you rarely think about. A fear with a visual component is scarier than one without. A fear you have experienced firsthand (such as a crime) is scarier than a statistic.
President Trump used identity persuasion to remind voters that they were Americans first. Clinton used identity persuasion to tell women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community that they were on her team.
The next time someone is doing something you find objectionable, don’t attack that person’s actions. Instead, ask if this is who the person wants to be. Most people think they are good people, even if they sometimes do bad things. If you remind them of their identity, and their aspirations for their identity, you will usually be met with cognitive dissonance and an implied promise to change.
Other person: “I like defacing the political signs on the other side. Ha-ha! It’s hilarious.” You: “Is that the person you want to be?” Other person (now with cognitive dissonance): “Um, I was just doing it that one time because I was with Bob, and we had some drinks.”
if you catch a normal adult doing something outside what you imagine is their aspiration of a core identity, you can sometimes flip them to be compatible with their preferred identity almost instantly. Just point out the gap and watch it close.
it is easier to persuade people when they expect to be persuaded. If your persuasion skills are viewed as credible, people will persuade themselves that you can persuade them, and that makes everything easier. Credibility,
once you convince the world that you are a great negotiator, that version of reality becomes self-fulfilling.
PERSUASION TIP 16 It is easier to persuade a person who believes you are persuasive.
The book is not just about persuasion—it is persuasion.
none of my clients said they were Chinese in a prior life, which seems statistically unlikely given that a quarter of the planet is Chinese.
The concept of setting the table for persuasion has a lot of obvious elements, such as dressing for the part and broadcasting your credentials. But there is also a deeper and scarier level that cognitive scientists have discovered. It turns out that you can influence people’s future opinions simply by exposing them to cleverly selected images and ideas that are totally unrelated to the topic of your persuasion.
Dress for the part. If you dress like a knowledgeable professional, people will assume your opinions and advice are credible. That makes it easier to persuade. Improve your physical appearance via diet, exercise, hair care, etc. Attractive people are more persuasive. Broadcast your credentials in a way that appears natural and not braggy. People admire talent but they hate bragging. Brand yourself as a winner. If people expect you to win, they will be biased toward making it happen. Meet in the most impressive space you can control. This creates a physical and visual impression that broadcasts
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Whenever there is mass confusion and complexity, people automatically gravitate to the strongest, most confident voice. We
If you borrow a million dollars from a bank, the bank essentially owns you. But if you borrow $10 billion, you own the bank.
You might have asked yourself who in their right mind would intentionally be so provocative as to attract nonstop negative news coverage. The answer is a Master Persuader. The extra criticism was worth the pain because it sucked up all the media attention and rendered his Republican primary challengers invisible.
Trump deactivated the incoming attacks by ensuring there were too many of them. The news business has to cover the newest stories, at the expense of the old ones. Trump could relegate any unflattering story to the back burner by introducing new provocations (often via tweet) every day.
Wow!
Trump used his mastery of the news cycle to create the impression that he was the most important person running for president, even if you hated him. When people are important, we start to feel they must be capable too, at least to some degree, because being capable is usually what makes people important. Our minds are primed to see important, capable people as leaders.
PERSUASION TIP 17 People prefer certainty over uncertainty, even when the certainty is wrong.
Trump was confident and clear about his priorities. But he was famously unclear about his preferred policy details. That is good persuasion technique.
